Battle Royale

Call him boss, huh? Sho thought as he looked over each of his eyes in the mirror. But you ended up getting killed by that so-called boss. You're a fool.

It was true. Sho Tsukioka had been more cautious than Mitsuru. It wasn't as if he had a clear sense of Kazuo the way Mitsuru had imagined right before his death, but Sho had always held the basic belief that betrayals happen all the time. That's how the world is. One could say that, compared to Mitsuru, who was just a good fighter, Sho, who'd seen more of the adult world as a result of going in and out of the gay bar his father ran ever since he was a kid, was more sophisticated.

Instead of heading straight to the southern tip of the island, as Kazuo had requested, Sho moved inward from the coast, weaving his way through the woods. This ended up being a hassle, but it probably only cost him ten more minutes.

He ended up seeing it all from the woods along the beach. Three bodies, two wearing coats and one in her sailor suit, sprawled on the rock stretching out into the ocean across the beach. There was Kazuo Kiriyama, standing quietly in the crevice of the rock, hidden in shadows from the moonlight.

Mitsuru Numai appeared almost immediately. After a brief exchange, he was pummeled by machine gun bullets and left on the rock that was drenched with blood now (its stench even reached Sho)...

Oh my, Sho thought. This is trouble.

By the time he began following Kazuo Kiriyama walking away from the scene, Sho had already decided on his course of action.

To assist him in this course of action, the top candidate was undoubtedly Kazuo Kiriyama. He couldn't hear what Kazuo and Mitsuru were saying to each other, but given how Kazuo had decided to play the game, he was sure Kazuo would be the best. Furthermore, at the very least, Kazuo carried not only a machine gun (was that his supplied weapon or did it belong to one of the three students he had killed?) but also Mitsuru's pistol. No one could win in a direct confrontation with Kazuo now.

Sho had one advantage though, something he knew he was extremely good at. He had a talent for sneaking into places and stealing when no one was looking and was also good at following people. (When he found a boy he liked, he could stalk him endlessly.) A talent to be sneaky—what do you mean sneaky, how dare you?—in all respects. As for the weapon he found in his day pack, it was a Derringer .22 Double High Standard. The cartridge was a magnum, lethal at close range, but not the best gun for a shootout.

So Sho thought, even if Kazuo Kiriyama was going to emerge victorious, he'd have to take on tough guys like Shogo Kawada and Shinji Mimura (definitely my type) who, if they had guns, would probably end up injuring him. And all that fighting should wear him out.

Then...I'll just follow him until the end. At the very end I can just shoot him from behind. The moment he thinks he's finished off the last one, he'll let his guard down and that's when I'll shoot him. Even Kazuo would never suspect someone would be following him, especially me, since I blew him off last night.

That way Sho wouldn't have to sully his hands in this game where you had to kill your classmates off one by one. It wasn't that he felt a strong moral objection to killing them, it was just that, he thought, I don't want to kill innocent kids, it's so vulgar. Kazuo's going to do the killing. I'm just going to stay behind him. He might be killing someone right in front of me, but it's not like I can interfere, that's too dangerous. And so at the very end, I'm going to kill him out of self-defense. I mean, if I don't kill him, he'll kill me. That was his line of thinking.

There was another advantage he had in following Kazuo. If he stayed close to Kazuo, then he wouldn't have to worry much about being attacked. And on the off chance that he was, as long as he dodged the first attack Kazuo would have to respond. All Sho would have to do is flee the scene and Kazuo would take care of the rest. Of course, that would also mean losing track of Kazuo, bringing his plan to an end, so he wanted to avoid this scenario as much as possible.